Tag: Debt Ceiling

Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer and the other “Left, Right & Center” panelists discuss House Speaker John Boehner’s decision to allow a vote on a debt ceiling increase despite resistance from fellow Republicans, The New York Times’ call for an end of the debt limit and the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger.

The deceiving viral video that helped America justify fighting proxy wars in Africa has left its mark; Obamacare critics rant against Canadian style health care, but there are key differences between our system and that of our neighbor to the north; meanwhile, France is belatedly outraged about the NSA leaks. These discoveries and more after the jump.

Rather than resolving the debt crisis, lawmakers’ 11th-hour deal to raise the debt ceiling, which threatened to push the global economy over the edge, simply delayed it. Financial Times chief economics commentator, Martin Wolf, tells Bill Moyers the U.S. debt ceiling is “the legislative equivalent of a nuclear bomb aimed by the U.S. at itself.”

Ever fewer countries, allies, or enemies, are paying attention, much less kowtowing, to the once-formidable power of the world’s last superpower. The list of defiant figures—from Egyptian generals to Saudi princes, Iraqi Shiite leaders to Israeli politicians—is lengthening.

When GOP leaders tell rank-and-file Republicans to call Obamacare’s cost controls “death panels,” or to say the rich are “job creators,” or the poor are “takers rather than makers,” they all repeat the same words. Democrats never stick to the same message. They rarely even say the same thing the same way twice. In fact, their messages often conflict.

The debate in both Washington and the mainstream media over austerity measures, the alleged fiscal cliff and the looming debt crisis not only function to render anti-democratic pressures invisible, but also produce what the late sociologist C. Wright Mills once called “a politics of organized irresponsibility.”

Is there ever a good time to cut “entitlements”—the code word used by austerity hawks to refer to and demean publicly funded social welfare programs—host Andrew Ross Sorkin asked University of Texas economist James K. Galbraith on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Friday.

President Obama is set to begin his second term at a moment when the question is not what great things our nation can achieve but whether our government, in Obama’s words, can “stop lurching from crisis to crisis to crisis.”

A week before his inaugural, Obama says he won’t negotiate with Republicans over raising the debt limit. But the president’s strategy depends on there being enough sane voices left in the GOP to influence others. That’s far from clear.